Eleanor did not remember the words to the poem, or its author, or even when or where she first read it. She remembered only the refrain:

Pass and be counted, most beautiful, most terrible thing.

Perhaps she had heard it as a child – her mother would often read poems to her before bedtime — and indeed if she thought on it long enough she could convince herself that the first sound the poem possessed was the sound granted it by her mother’s pacific voice; a voice that, like the poem itself (for she could see at least the shape of the words in her memory, if not the words themselves), consoled even as it warned. For when the poem spoke through her mother it knew the truth about the world. An awful truth, a paradoxical truth, a truth won at too high a price, a truth that could save if only it were heeded, but which would not be heeded. And the poem knew this, too.

Eleanor could probably find the poem now.  She could type the refrain into any online search engine and instantly she would be overwhelmed by a cacophony of voices: commentaries, biographies, critical interpretations, and the like. But she chose never to do this, because she knew that the shape of the poem’s truth was its truth, and that to read or to hear again the work in its entirety was to witness this truth evaporate completely. “You know the old saying, some things are better left mysteries,” she would say to anyone who asked her about this willful ignorance, but of course no one had ever asked her, for she only ever spoke the refrain aloud when she was alone. Even then she would laugh at how pretentious she imagined she sounded, but still the words never ceased to move her.

Eleanor had decided years before that what she liked most about the line was its wonderful flexibility; how it could be angry or hopeful, vengeful or sad, religious or secular, depending on the inflection she chose to give to the words, such as placing more emphasis on beautiful or terrible. When her husband left her in June, for example, it came to her first as a kind of protective incantation, and later it offered itself to her as a rapier with which to wound him in the dark. This was satisfying at first, but eventually the underneath of the poem grew sharper in her mind until it wounded her too, and it reminded her then that its fluid wisdom was as much a sorrow to those who possessed it as it was to those who did not. Even still, she was grateful it came.

“I ride the number ten. I ride the number ten and sometimes — sometimes I ride the number fifteen.” The boy forced his hands from the sleeves of the winter coat that engulfed him, and held up all ten fingers. Eleanor smiled. “Do you ride all alone?” she said. The boy was sitting by himself on a row of empty seats across from her, and his tiny body jostled wildly with each pothole the late morning bus encountered.

“I ride alone til I get to Jefferson, then my daddy gets me,” the boy said.

“Well,” said Eleanor, straightening her back regally and looking down her nose at the child in mock admiration, “you are a brave little boy.”

The boy smiled, and for a moment seemed to be searching for the words to continue the conversation, but no words came, and so he smiled again. As his stop approached, he retracted his hands back into the sleeves of his coat, then attempted to flip his fur-lined hood up onto his head.

“Here honey, let me help you,” Eleanor said to the boy. She pulled the coat’s drawstring snugly down, but too far down at first, which left only the boy’s expressionless mouth visible. She laughed out loud at the sight of him, and then quickly adjusted the hood until she saw her face reflected in the boy’s enormous blue eyes. “There you go,” she said, patting him on the head warmly, “now you be careful getting off the bus.”

Eleanor’s stop was only a few blocks away from the boy’s, and she now entertained the thought of exiting with the child, to be sure that he reached his father safely. She imagined she would have something to say to this man when they met him, a man who would allow so small a child to ride a city bus alone, and she fished for the words she might want to use: Concerned. Irresponsible. Dangerous.

The poem had words for the father too, and she longed in this moment to speak through it as her mother had done years before, to use the poem to chasten the man, but to enlighten him also, for she knew that only in his voice would it consent to protect the boy from the truth it contained, and she wanted nothing more now than to protect the boy. But the shape of the poem — though her present agitation had brought it achingly close to her lips — still remained buried too deep to share, and to utter only the remembered fragment would no doubt make the man think she was simply insane — because wasn’t insanity just a failure to make the shape sensible to others, or to oneself?

Eleanor felt her back bend forward, her legs tense as if to rise, but the sound of the bus’ door folding shut caused her mind to abort this narrative at once, and she instead fell back into her seat, exhaling loudly.

The thought then occurred to her that she should at least get up and look out the opposite window, so that she might watch over the child for as long as she could, but by then the bus had pulled too far down the street, and the boy’s stop would almost certainly be out of view.

The poem rebuked her then, knotting itself in her stomach, hurting her. She did not protest.

“That’s ten seventy five, miss.” The beets and celery, lit by the summer sun, glowed in living hues of red and green, and Eleanor had found herself momentarily mesmerized by their brilliance. “Oh, of course,” she said, and frantically began searching her purse before handing the old man a crumpled ten and five. She knew this man well, or at least knew his face well. He had been selling vegetables at the farmer’s market for the three years she had been coming here, yet in all this time neither had spoken of anything more profound than the price of rutabagas. This had never bothered her before — why would it? — but today she felt acutely the weight of the poem on her body, a weight that had grown with age, a weight that was born from the burden of carrying something ineffable within.

The poem, sensing this, consented to be diminished in translation, the kind of which betrays little trace of the original, and in so doing reduced itself to a single question.

“Do you remember me?” Eleanor said to the old man, “I come see you every year — come to the market I mean.” The old man smiled tenderly, his frail face blanched by the the cloudless noonday sky, and he seemed to measure his words carefully before he spoke. “I’m sorry miss, I can’t say that I do,” he finally said, “but then — so many come, I guess at my age I can’t keep track of them all — hell, don’t even remember my grand kids half the time.” The old man chuckled as he handed Eleanor her change, then carefully encased her celery in plastic and lowered it into a paper bag. “I tell you what though,” he said suddenly, as if he had seized on something profound, “next time I sure won’t forget you.” He winked and passed the bag of vegetables to Eleanor, who managed a weak smile.

Eleanor could not have noticed, but if she had, she would have seen the old man fixate for the briefest of moments on her hands as they took the bag from his; the nails that were painted a deep red, the freckles that had grown darker in summer, the tiny, circular scar visible on the base of the thumb. Such a strangely shaped scar, the old man thought, and he told himself, with an urgency that even he did not fully understand, that the next time he saw this woman, he would have to ask her how she got it.